Cover

Title Page, Copyright

Contents

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Philip Laughlin and the team at the MIT Press for
their support in bringing this project to fruition. Thanks are also due to
the Australian Research Council for providing the fellowship that enabled
this work to be completed, as well as the Alexander von Humboldt
Foundation for their continuing support over a decade or more. ...

Introduction: The Thinking of Place

The idea of place—of topos—runs through the thinking of Martin Heidegger
almost from the very start. Although not always directly thematized—sometimes apparently obscured, displaced even, by other
concepts—and expressed through many different terms (Ort, Ortschaft,
Stätte, Gegend, Dasein, Lichtung, Ereignis),1 ...

I: Topological Thinking

1. The Topos of Thinking

If Heidegger’s thinking is, as he himself says, a “topology of being”
(Topologie des Seyns)1—a saying of the place of being—then what is
the place that appears here? What is the place of being, and in what
place does this thinking take place? ...

2. The Turning to/of Place

In T. H. White’s magnificent retelling of Malory, The Once and Future King,
the character of Merlin has one especially peculiar characteristic: he lives
his life backward, from future to past.1 It has always seemed to me that a
similarly backward trajectory is particularly suited to the reading of philosophers ...

3. The Place of Topology

The idea of philosophical topology, or “topography” as I call it outside of
the Heideggerian context, takes the idea of place or topos as the focus for
the understanding of the human, the understanding of world, and the
understanding of the philosophical. Although the idea is not indebted
solely to Heidegger’s thinking ...

II: Topological Concepts

4. Ground, Unity, and Limit

With Heidegger, philosophy seems to have remained in greatness: although
Heidegger’s treatment of the question concerning the ground of beings
undergoes important shifts in the course of his philosophical career, still
the question of ground remains always near the center of his thinking.1 ...

5. Nihilism, Place, and “Position”

According to late Heidegger, the contemporary world is suffering from an
“oblivion of being”—we live, he says, in a “desolate time,” a time of destitution,
a time of the “world’s night.”1 He sees this desolation and destitution
as most accurately diagnosed by two key thinkers, one of whom is
the poet Friedrich Hölderlin and the other the philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche. ...

6. Place, Space, and World

The way in which the question of world is implicated with the question
of space is already indicated by Heidegger’s very characterization, in Being
and Time, of the essence of human being, Dasein, as being-in-the-world.
Here the nature of “being in” is as much at issue as is the nature of “world,” ...

7. Geography, Biology, and Politics

To what extent are those forms of contemporary thinking that adopt a
holistic or ecological conception of the relation between human being and
the environing world associated, even if only implicitly, with a conservative
and reactionary politics? That there is such an association is often
claimed in relation to a number of thinkers, ...

III: Topological Horizons

8. Philosophy’s Nostalgia

What is wrong with nostalgia? How and why has it come to be the case,
as it surely has, that to say of a philosophical position that it is “nostalgic”
is already to indicate its inadequacy?1 In this chapter I want to examine
nostalgia both as a mood or disposition in general, and as a mood or disposition
that is characteristic of philosophical reflection. ...

9. Death and the End of Life

“Eternity is a terrible thought,” says Rosencrantz in Tom Stoppard’s alternative
view on Hamlet,“ I mean, where’s it going to end?” And Guildenstern
adds a little later,“ Death followed by eternity . . . the worst of both worlds.
It is a terrible thought.”1 Death, as they say, is forever, but if the same were
true of life ...

10. Topology, Triangulation, and Truth

Heidegger’s Being and Time is not primarily concerned with questions of
interpretation or understanding. Its driving interest is instead ontological—an interest in the question of the “ meaning of being. ” Yet inasmuch as the
work adopts a thoroughly hermeneuticized approach to ontology ...

11. Heidegger in Benjamin’s City

The work of Walter Benjamin is inextricably bound with the images and
ideas associated with the metropolitan spaces and places that figure so
prominently in his writing, and in close proximity to which his own life,
from his childhood in Berlin to the last years in Paris, was lived. ...

12. The Working of Art

What is the relation between the “objectivity” of an artwork, that is, its
material being as an object, and its nature as an artwork?1 The relation is
surely not an irrelevant or contingent one, and yet its nature is not at all
self-evident. Indeed, in the case of some artworks, namely those that fall
within the category of certain forms of so-called conceptual art, ...

Epilogue: Beginning in Wonder

“It is through wonder [thaumazein],” says Aristotle, “that men now begin
and originally began to philosophize”;1 and as Plato tells us, through the
mouth of Socrates,“wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy
begins in wonder.”2 These sayings are well known, and they are also representative
of an important thread that runs through much of the Western
philosophical tradition.3 ...

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